Update On Domain Move

Thought I’d give you all an update on the domain move. I think I’ll have everything done by tomorrow, but I’ll likely hold off on moving till sometime late in the day or evening on Friday. Things should be a little slower over the weekend and moving will probably be a little less disruptive at that time. While I’m doing what I can to ensure a smooth move I assume I’ll break a few things along the way and hopefully the weekend will allow some time to sort out the most major of breaks.
Ideally this will be the last post you see here and sometime Friday your feed reader will take you to a post welcoming you to the new site. Of course we don’t live in an ideal world. I’ll post once more here on Friday after redirecting the feed. Hopefully you won’t see that post, but if you do I’ll leave a link to the new site and hope you won’t mind resubscribing. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that you won’t need to and I think most won’t have to. This is the first time I’ve moved a site like this and I want to be prepared for the unexpected. I’m trying to account for everything, but I realize I don’t know what everything might be.

To give you a little detail of where I am, most of the work is done. I have to export/import posts and comments from the last week or so. I’ve never been one to make things easy on myself and a few last minute changes are resulting in the need to redo a couple of things I had previously finished. I built the new site using one version of WordPress on one server and then upgraded WP and moved everything to a new server last week. That broke a couple of plugins and in my haste to move I lost a few modifications I had made to a handful of others that I need to add again. Nothing major, but a few hours extra work nonetheless.

Bear with me a couple more days and check back late Friday or over the weekend to see the new site. If you’re following me on Twitter I’ll likely tweet there when the move is done.

Sometime next week after the dust has settled I’ll explain why I’m moving the site to a new domain and why I’m also redesigning the site itself.

Moving domains is not a trivial undertaking, so kudos for pulling it off. The actual move never seems to take very long, with the lion’s share of time spent in one of two ways:
1. Planning what you’ll do and when to do it;
2. Scrambling around to fix stuff because you didn’t do #1.

SEO adds a wrinkle, of course, as you don’t want to lose any search power old pages have garnered when you move them.

Not trivial at all. Moving itself isn’t too hard like you say. For me it was that trying to be a perfectionist thing. I tested and played around with a lot of different plugins and experimented a lot with the design.

I also made things difficult for myself by changing the permalinks structure so the redirection wasn’t a few quick lines. I ended up mapping posts one to one. I also ran through all the old posts to change the code on the links. All the links are absolute and it seemed silly to have them pointing back to the old site and then redirect them back here. Not hard work, but tedious and time consuming.

And then of course I decided to change the permalinks a little again and had to go through the posts one more time.

Search wise I expect to take a temporary hit in traffic while the engines catch up with all the redirection, but I think I covered all the bases and expect it to be temporary.